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Remembering Leften Stavrianos,
1913-2004
Kevin Reilly
Raritan Valley Community College
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In the beginning there were L.S. Stavrianos and
William H. McNeill. To teach world history in the 1960s or 1970's
was to teach Stavrianos or McNeill. It was right that American world
history teaching was initiated by two Canadians who specialized in Balkan
history. Canada provided the necessary perspective. The Balkans
offered a world in miniature, numerous languages to master, and the need
to produce a narrative that transcended national needs. |
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While the fathers of world history were never close,
their similar paths were announced to each other by twists of coincidence.
Both served with the OSS during the Greek Civil War, McNeill sending dispatches
from the field in Greece and Stavrianos reading them in Washington.
The same war from different sides, Stavrianos mused years later. After
publishing in Greek and Balkan history, both recognized the need to create
models to teach world history. Both applied to the Carnegie Foundation
and both learned of the others application when they received each
other's acceptance letter in misaddressed envelopes. |
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Both were materialists, Stavrianos out of Marx and
a line of evolutionary anthropology that stretched back to Lewis Henry Morgan;
McNeill a student of technology, demography, and ecology. Each concentrated
on their own kind of social history. McNeill charted the impact of
the tools of war, pathogens, and the interaction of steppe and sown; Stavrianos
studied political power and social class. Neither did
much initially with Africa, or women, or culture, though both used illustrations
effectively. Stavrianos had an eye for the perfect quote, primary sources
that made students stand up and take notice. Perhaps they called on
world history to do different things. Both wanted it to explain, but
Stavrianos also wanted to change the world. |
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Leften was a bear of a man. When I first met
him, I had trouble reconciling the citizen of the world I had read with
the Greek fisherman I saw, and that I heard in comments like "And he's Greek
to boot" when Michael Dukakis won the Democratic presidential nomination.
Leften was a cosmopolitan Zorba. Of all his accomplishments, he sometimes
seemed most proud of his world history text used by all the students of
Greece. It was an assignment that he eagerly accepted from his old
friend and colleague at Northwestern, Andreas Papandreou. But when
Papandreou and his Hellenic Socialist Union fell under a pall of scandal,
and when Papandreou left his wife for an Olympic Airways stewardess, Leften
kept contact only with Margaret and the children. |
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Leften was a deeply moral man, hungry for fairness.
He was not an angry man, but he would grow livid at injustice, especially
the abuse of privilege. As a waiter in a Vancouver skid row restaurant
during the depression, he saw the humiliation of grown men who were homeless
and unemployed. It was his first university, he later wrote.
It taught him "that all societies are powerfully flawed by a gap between
official rhetoric and social reality, promise and practice, and the role
of a historian should be to cast light on the origins of that gap."
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Leften wrote with immediacy, clarity, and passion.
He enthusiastically embraced the era's goal of "relevance." But it
was a relevance that was neither teleological nor presentist. Relevance
does not mean "recent," he wrote. "That paleolithic people worked
much less than we do today, and probably suffered proportionately less starvation
and malnutrition than our present 5 billion do, is of infinitely more relevance
than most of the information that we get on our nightly news reports."
He wrote like he spoke, savoring the blunt over the polite, the simple over
the complex. |
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It has become somewhat fashionable recently in world
history circles to dismiss the early textbooks in the field as cookie-cutter,
"Western Civ Plus." Every new textbook that was published in the last
two decades trumpeted itself as the first "genuine" world history.
This characterization is far off the mark when applied to the texts of Stavrianos
and McNeill. Different as they were from each other, they were each
highly original and aggressively global texts. Long before "Big
History," Stavrianos's text devoted over a tenth of its pre-1500 coverage
to the paleolithic and neolithic eras, subjects that were not even mentioned
in Western Civilization texts. Leften's reader, the first in the field,
The Epic of Man, gathered a global range of sources barely considered
beyond their area specialties, many of which have since become cannonical
for world historians. His Global Rift, the first general
history of the third world radically changed the teaching of modern world
history. These first efforts at defining the field were both more
original and more global than many of the texts published for the growing
demand of world history courses in the 1980s and 1990s. In the efforts
to meet mass enrollments in recent boom decades, the range of introductory
approaches to world history has actually diminished. Thanks to the
enormously fruitful work in world history research, we have gained a depth
and sophistication undreamed of forty years ago, but our range of introductory
courses has been reduced by the demands of professional codification and
mass market merchandising. The loss of Leften Stavrianos tragically
reduces our range further. |
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